Many of Hong Sang-soo’s films are structured around a woman’s solitary wanderings. The single ladies played by Kim Min-Hee in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “The Woman Who Ran,” or Lee Hye-Young in “In Front of Your Face,” are free radicals, moving from encounter to encounter and disrupting the equilibrium of the people they meet, as meandering conversations reveal a friend’s dissatisfaction or a couple’s disagreement. Sometimes, as in “On the Beach at Night Alone” or “In Front of Your Face,” the woman is an actress; always she is a source of fascination and fear, and, as characters reveal themselves to someone new, she becomes a metaphor for the artist in society—she reveals the subtext beneath all the banalities on the surface of Hong’s films.
In “The Novelist’s Film,” the majority of which is set over the course of a single day in Seoul’s outer suburbs, the woman, again played by Lee Hye-Young, is an author. Her character Junhee is perceptive, “charismatic” (as multiple characters insist), and dissatisfied with pat answers and evasions—she makes this clear during master-shot conversations that begin with Hong’s characteristic small talk, and develop into sharp confrontations with histories of professional discourtesy and artistic angst. Though it lacks the near-spiritual dimension of the recent “In Front of Your Face” (Hong’s best in years), “The Novelist’s Film” is another focused, charming autofiction, well-structured yet open to the inspirations of serendipity.
Successful, prolific novelist Junhee (Lee, chic in a bob, chunky woven scarf, and unstructured jacket) arrives one day at a bookstore run by Sewon (Seo Younghwa), an old friend from Seoul’s literary scene. The two have fallen out of touch, which seems, at least to Junhee, to have been Sewon’s intention in retiring to a quiet life in the provinces. Before heading back to the city, Junhee also runs into Hyojin (Kwon Hawhyo), a filmmaker who once planned to adapt one of her novels, only to abandon the project. After a bit of awkwardness in which Junhee doesn’t recognize Hyojin’s wife under his mask, she accuses him of blowing up the adaptation, and of being too ambitious. Little things like COVID-era mask etiquette (Hyojin’s keeps slipping down off the tip of his nose) are one way in which Hong films, so similar in their sketchbook form and café and storefront locations, can be differentiated; they’re like an almanac, logging minute changes in the social weather. Another such change noted in “The Novelist’s Film” has to do with the literal weather: it’s winter, and the trees are bare, and the grass is dead, the air seems harsh, but unlike in “Hotel By the River,” or “Oki’s Movie,” there’s no snow on the ground. It’s unseasonably warm; this is just how Hong found the world during the time he was making this movie, and how we note the passage of time as we watch it.
Finally, in a park, on an unseasonably warm winter day, Junhee meets Kilsoo (Kim Min-Hee), an actress who admires Junhee’s writing; Junhee admires Kilsoo’s acting, and also her decision to step back from the pressures of the Korean film industry. (Kim Min-Hee has not acted for any filmmaker save Hong in the half-decade since the two went public with an extramarital affair that scandalized Korea.) Junhee has the idea to direct a film with Kilsoo, one which sounds, from her description, much like a Hong Sang-soo film: She’ll shoot digitally, stay close to the actors, and take inspiration from them and their lives, their presences, and the things going on around them.
Hong famously writes his films as he makes them, within the constraints of an initial premise. A great pleasure of his diaristic, on-the-fly style is seeing how his preoccupations recur, overlap, and evolve. In “The Novelist’s Film,” characters talk about quitting drinking, or at least trying to—there’s a typical Hong Sang-soo binge-drinking sequence, though this time the empty bottles strewn across the tables where the actors sit contained makgeolli instead of soju—and about the artist’s life. His characters are frequently filmmakers and actors and other artists and intellectuals, who inevitably share his views on art-making in ways that self-reflexively mirror his films’ constructions. Money comes up quite a bit in “The Novelist’s Film”—a perpetual concern of the independent artist—as do acknowledgments of burnout and arguments about whether not striving to work within the mainstream Korean culture industry is a “waste” of one’s talent.
It seems relevant to note that Kim Minhee is credited as this film’s production manager; Hong, as per usual these days, is writer, director, cinematographer, editor, composer, sound designer, producer, and executive producer. All the main actors are regular collaborators of Hong during his one-man-band phase. Junhee confesses to Kilsoo that she’s recently had writer’s block—in a thought that seems to come out of Hong Sang-soo’s head via her lips, she says she wants to get past the need to “exaggerate” in order to have some drama to hang a book on. She wants to be mellowed out, more at peace with the world, and more open to it, just as Hong wants to make small movies in freehand, with his chosen family of colleagues.
Junhee tells Kilsoo this over ramen at a noodle shop, where the two sit facing each other before a large glass window. Viewers of Hong over the last half-decade of his career will be used to seeing chilly, slightly blown-out black-and-white streetscapes through the windows of bars and restaurants, and surprised by what happens next. On the other side of this particular window, in the middle of Junhee’s monologue, a little girl in a snowsuit stops outside and stares through the window for at least a minute, as if captivated by Kilsoo’s beauty or else Hong’s camera, in a moment which is either an inspired bit of writing or a providential bit of happenstance, and either way speaks to the role of chance in art, of the freshness that comes when you stop being jaded and let the world in through the open windows of your films. This attitude pays off in the beautiful ending of “The Novelist’s Film,” a glimpse of Junhee and Kilsoo’s titular project which plays like an outtake, a home video or a memory. Hong has always given viewers the impression that he—or, rather, he and Kim—are making exactly the film they want to make, but rarely before “The Novelist’s Film” has it seemed to bring the two of them such pure bliss. [B+]
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